


Sights and Sounds

by TheInternationalAffair



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Blind Character, Blindness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 08:35:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheInternationalAffair/pseuds/TheInternationalAffair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mircea and Ciprian like to play a game where Ciprian uses sound as sight. (Romania and blind!Moldova human AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sights and Sounds

**Author's Note:**

> The very short cast:
> 
> Romania:Mircea  
> Ciprian:Moldova  
> Ponify as needed.
> 
> (From Tumblr:
> 
> OTL I did research some stuff to make sure I wasn't typing up misinformation, so fingers crossed :') This was inspired by a segment on Germany's Super-brain where a blind teenager uses echolocation to see. I feel like I need to put a disclaimer here, but anyway, yeah-- Focusing more on brotherly bonding, really. I'm imagining here that Ciprian is a very, very smart kid.)
> 
> XOXO,  
> TheInternationalAffair

Mircea stared at the shelf of pots and pans in the pantry, drumming his uncut fingernails on one older, rusty pot. No--pots wouldn't do. Pots were much too easy. The large hole that made a pot--well, a pot, combined with metal that sound waves could bounce off of in too perfect of a circle. If Mircea were to give Ciprian a pot, it would be guessed in seconds and Ciprian would accuse Mircea of underestimating his capabilities.

"I can hear you tapping your fingers on the pans, Mircea." A small voice mocked Mircea's decision making method, "Are you going to make this hard for me or what?" 

"What can I say, you're getting too good at this," the man replied absently, too focused on picking out a good, complicated item to confuse his little sibling with, "Before you turn twelve you'll probably map out the entire house. I'll never need a housekeeper to find things for me again."

"We don't even have a housekeeper," retorted Ciprian, now kneading his hands impatiently against the wooden table. There was almost a rhythm to it, as if he was making music (and who knew what else the young boy was capable of.)

Mircea sharply wheeled around to face Ciprian, even though he knew full well that Ciprian wouldn't be able to tell. Not at this distance, anyway. But it felt necessary for the dramatic effect.

"Look, do you want me to find you an object or not?" 

"Sorry, Mircea." Ciprian apologized meekly and went back to drumming on the table, his ears lighting up to the velvet tones of his knuckles on polished acacia. Two distant eyes stared unknowingly at the water pitcher a few feet in front of Ciprian, though his attention was somewhere else. 

At the moment, Mircea was too occupied with one of the kitchen drawers, which desperately needed organizing. After sifting past graters, fruit peelers, and a very strangely-shaped lemon juicer given to him from the old neighbors next door, Mircea finally settled on a bottle-opener that resembled a starving penguin when its handles were pulled away from the screw. Carefully, Mircea took out the metal object and drove it with equal caution into a cube of corkboard used for skewers (that had since gone missing one New Year's celebration ago), tiptoeing to where Ciprian was sitting. He quietly set the contraption down in front of Ciprian, careful not to let the boy hear him placing it. The success of this activity required complete silence. 

Ciprian could sense Mircea's presence, however, and nearly raised his tongue in preparation when Mircea quickly stopped him.

"Wait for me to clap first," he told Ciprian, whose left eye was now twitching in excitement, perhaps imagining the many shapes that this object could take the form of.

Ciprian nodded and relaxed his jaw, and as soon as he sighed deeply back into his chair, Mircea clapped his hands together sharply, signaling for Ciprian to begin.

Without a second of hesitation, Ciprian leaned forward towards the bottle opener, barely touching the object as if he could already sense its presence. His vacant brown lids flickered excitedly as he rocked back and forth along the bottle opener, the distance thinning as he was able to determine the width of the object and was now moving up and down along its length. His tongue clicked dryly at a steady 160 beats per minute, a number that Mircea had only determined while waiting for Ciprian to finish examining one very tall and lopsided lamp. The bottle opener was much smaller than the lamp, but the thickness of its pieces and its shapes, Mircea had figured, would have made it difficult to guess. 

And he was right—after a few more clicks, Ciprian slumped backwards, his fingers trying to draw out the shapes he heard in the air, his brow furrowed, and his eyes staring out of the kitchen, searching for some reference.

“Well?”

“You cheated. You stuck it into something and it sounds like it’s a cube.”

“I had to, alright? It wouldn’t have stood up by itself,” Mircea quickly explained. Ciprian wasn’t completely convinced.

“Are you trying to drop a hint on me?” The boy asked pointedly, expecting a proper explanation for what Mircea had done.

“No, I just don’t want you to accuse me of cheating, alright? Just try. I think you’ll get it.”

“Alright, but if you mess this one up, I’m going to start playing this by myself,” replied Ciprian irritably before he huffed over-exaggeratedly and resumed his tongue-clicks along the bottle opener before Mircea could question on how that would have been possible.

Mircea could only begin to imagine what Ciprian sees in his head. Ciprian had described it as something like drawing black thick lines that came to life, except you couldn’t exactly see the black lines, if not sense them. But Ciprian was lucky, in some sense of the word—there were a few years at the beginning of the young boy’s life when Ciprian could see, so at the very least he had a reference to go back on. Neither of the brothers could visualize not having vision from the start—it was, to them, something that could be described in thousands of ways but never truly understood.

In Ciprian’s case, Ciprian hadn’t learned all of the colors before he had rapidly started losing sight—he often described colors he did imagine in terms of primaries, black, and white, and stubbornly stuck to the guideline.

Ciprian did, however, learn how to recognize objects by clicking. His sensitive ears could pick up the slightest change of frequencies and signal to him the position and appearance of a nearby object. Stemming from a nasty habit of clicking constantly in idle times, Ciprian’s newfound skills soon aided him in getting around much more easily once he was able to harness its potential. Once he had mastered the clicking technique (Mircea thought it sounded like a very scratchy ticking on a very fast clock), he started to nag Mircea about helping him recognize even more objects besides walls and people using his “human bat powers.” And thus came about the inception of the brothers’ favorite game.

Ciprian was now back in his position of near defeat, frowning at seemingly the back of a loveseat in the adjacent living room. Mircea wondered if the object he had picked was too hard.

“Giving up already?” Mircea asked, but Ciprian silently shook his head and leaned back forward one more time, focusing on the square handle on top and the long, slender screw at the bottom.

After staring at the final longingly for a final few seconds, Ciprian said with great decisiveness, “It’s a bottle opener. There’s a handle on top and a thin stick on the bottom that goes through the middle, and every piece of it isn’t very thick. There’s two arms flying upward that sound like they’re handles.”

“And how did you know it was specifically a bottle opener?” inquired Mircea, genuinely surprised at Ciprian’s quick success. He had thought it would have taken him a bit longer.

“The shape. There’s a part that’s round attached to a part that’s flat halfway through, and I thought of a bottle fitting in there.”

Mircea grinned widely. “Perfect. What did you think of this one?”

"I liked the hat better," Ciprian complained.

Mircea rolled his eyes and replied, "But you always want to do the hat." 

He knew the hat that Ciprian was speaking of all too well. It was the first thing that his little brother was able to recognize by clicking. Mircea had given to him the small black bowler hat a few years ago before the boy had completely lost sight, and before he knew it he would walk into the ever-observant Ciprian bobbing his head around it, his eyes closed, his mouth making the soft clicking noises that would eventually serve as Ciprian's new ‘eyes’. It had become a tradition for Mircea and Ciprian to end with the hat every time they played the guessing game. 

"Well, are we going to do the hat?" Ciprian's head tilted up at Mircea expectingly, his fists back at the table tapping at their usual rhythm.

"We always do the hat last," Mircea gently reminded Ciprian, ruffling his already messy hair, "Do you want to stop already?"

Ciprian craned his neck and chewed on his cheek before he finally replied, "Fine. But you can't let me see when you're bringing it out." 

"That won't be a problem," said Mircea, and he stood up and headed back to the kitchen to see what else he could find.


End file.
